In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children--Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat--wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look into the eye of the storm. "An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . The Eye of the Storm is] an intensely dramatic masterpiece" (The Australian).

After her mother's death, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed of the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. The Australian author won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.